I think one if the most beautifully designed app loaded with desktop level functionality, yet optimized for mobile, is Intua's Beatmaker II. Amazing. One of the best apps.
It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
21–30 of 93 posts
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#22The only major problem I see here is the app store itself. Discoverability is a huge problem... It is the one that I am most shocked that Apple has done nothing about. I routinely have trouble finding apps that have been released, and it is easy to get lost in the crowd. My company has released a few apps (we contract for other guys) and it is almost pure luck which ones end up picking up steam (certainly not our best work).
I don't know the android market well... it seems to be better, but only on the margins. I am surprised that noone has come up with a better way.
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#23Is it just me or does anyone who seriously thinks any app that resembles "photoshop, but on your phone" is going to be successful really have a strange perspective on what people use their phones for?
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#24> the reason why developers are shackled to Objective C is to make sure processes finish in human time, and this is fundamentally a performance bottleneck in mobile hardware.
This is completely false. You can get good performance with high level languages like lisp. It doesn't have to look like C to be fast and to be possible to optimize it well.
The whole "writing low level code is faster" mentality is WRONG for 99% of apps.
The software game industry is wrong too.
Abstraction is a good thing, not a bad thing. Abstraction helps us write better code, and can help improve performance. Abstraction is not something to sacrifice for performance; in general sacrificing abstraction hurts performance because the bottlenecks are things like humans understanding what's going on, being able to write good algorithms which is harder with lower level code, and how long it takes them (so how much time is left over to analyze and fix code bottlenecks).
Low level languages waste time while making things harder on programmers. And they do this to no particular benefit.
None of this is to say that Objective C is terrible. It's certainly a lot better than C or C++. It has some good abstraction capabilities. But there is absolutely no reason we couldn't use a higher level language on mobile devices and get better performance for less developer time.
(The biggest real obstacles are things like the unpopularity of lisp -- it would, sadly and irrationally, mean less iOS devs and hurt Apple -- and the lack of high quality programmers who understand these things available to hire to make it.)
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#25Are there many examples of iPhone apps that are simultaneously (and somewhat objectively): (1) beautiful, (2) easy to use, and (3) useful, that still don't go anywhere? I've been trolling around the app store for awhile trying to understand the market and what I see are tons of novelty apps, fugly apps (by anyone's standards), buggy apps, and apps that break usability in all kinds of ways. And judging by the lack of…
The market was highly profitable when it was small supply / big demand and you had good odds that Apple would hand you tons of visibility. Now it's big supply with a terrible signal to noise ratio. To succeed, it seems that you now either need a mountain of luck, or a killer marketing engine and a fair amount of luck. Mathematically, it seems unattractive compared to other ways of applying the same time and skills un…
I mostly agree, but take it from voice of experience, having web application available does not magically lead to two hundred people giving you their CCs and sticking around for a year. You have to roll up your sleeves and market. This is often much, much harder than making the actual application.
(I think the App Store gets a lot of ink because people have this notion that Apple does the marketing for devs like you. Which is true, in approximately the same sense that the MBA does marketing for basketball players like Shaq.)
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#26[deleted]
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#27> But it won’t run on anything less than an iPhone 3GS.
This is a general problem with mobile given how fast the hardware is moving along. And given that the 3GS is what, ~2.5 year old hardware? I don't think that it's crazy that an app won't run on anything less (I do think it's crazy that Apple still sells the 3GS). And I think consumers also kind of expect that if they do have older (pre 3GS) hardware, things are going to be slow. Also, despite the overall evilness of American cell carriers, it is kind of helpful to us mobile developers that they do their best to enforce a 2 year upgrade cycle with hardware.
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#28> the reason why developers are shackled to Objective C is to make sure processes finish in human time, and this is fundamentally a performance bottleneck in mobile hardware. This is completely false. You can get good performance with high level languages like lisp. It doesn't have to look like C to be fast and to be possible to optimize it well. The whole "writing low level code is faster" mentality is WRONG for 99%…
How is Objective-C a lot better than C++?
What do you mean by "the software game industry is wrong too"?
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#29"For a generation of coders accustomed to limitless managed memory, high-level programming abstractions, and thousands of deeply functional opensource libraries, mobile is a step back to the Byzantine world of Commodore 64s."
This made me chuckle. Maybe if you define "generation" as "this year's college output" then you might be right, but if we're talking "generation" as in the past lifetime of software development then it's nowhere close.
Only in the last 5-10 years have we seen the rise of the well put together framework.
Also, I have no experience with iOS, but the Android framework is pretty damn nice from the perspective of somebody who actually lived through the C64 days!
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#30Are there many examples of iPhone apps that are simultaneously (and somewhat objectively): (1) beautiful, (2) easy to use, and (3) useful, that still don't go anywhere? I've been trolling around the app store for awhile trying to understand the market and what I see are tons of novelty apps, fugly apps (by anyone's standards), buggy apps, and apps that break usability in all kinds of ways. And judging by the lack of…
The market was highly profitable when it was small supply / big demand and you had good odds that Apple would hand you tons of visibility. Now it's big supply with a terrible signal to noise ratio. To succeed, it seems that you now either need a mountain of luck, or a killer marketing engine and a fair amount of luck. Mathematically, it seems unattractive compared to other ways of applying the same time and skills un…
This may be true for mass-market apps, but we have had a lot of success selling high quality, useful, niche-market apps priced $5 and up. The App Store makes it insanely easy for people to buy something that seems useful to them, whereas they would at least think twice before paying for a webapp subscription.